THE MAN INSIDE BILL CLINTON'S FOREIGN POLICY

By Jason DeParle;

Published: August 20, 1995

THE NEWS ARRIVED IN A NOTE MARKED urgent by a red dot. In a few hours, it would plunge the Bosnian war into a desperate new phase. But for the moment, the note brought a smile to the open, impish face of Anthony Lake for it told him that the warplanes were finally on the way. "They've turned the keys," he said to the other officials at the interrupted White House staff meeting. At long last, the United Nations was going to punish the Bosnian Serbs for their barbarous assaults on Sarajevo.

Lake walked down the hall to the Oval Office, where he offered the welcome news to President Clinton. The President congratulated him on the breakthrough, and Lake warned him not to specify in public which country had sent the planes. The Serbs, he warned, might take hostages. When the phone rang at 4:34 the next morning, May 26, Lake's fears were being realized. Gen. John Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was calling. Lake had to delay their talk as he groped for the key to convert his home phone to a secure line. Yet the crux of the general's report was scarcely secret. Serbian commanders, enraged by the bombing, had fired the single deadliest shell of the war, killing 71 civilians in the town of Tuzla. They were about to take hundreds of U.N. hostages. And over the next few months, the killing -- or as Lake says, the "evil" -- that he had hoped to contain would rage out of control.

IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS hard, this job that Lake self-mockingly calls "national security adviser of the free world." Not in the aftermath of the cold war and the end of superpower rivalry. And not for William Anthony Kirsopp Lake, whose whole career was a preparation for the post. After three decades of striving to reconcile American power and principle, Lake came to office at a time that seemed uniquely blessed. The nation's enemies had collapsed. Its ideals had triumphed. And Lake had what appeared to be an unparalleled chance to pursue what he called "democracy's promise of a better, safer world."

Instead, he wakes up each day to an ambivalent President, a contentious Congress, a public tempted by isolationism and a world of perverse new crises. It is a heavy load and it falls on a man whose marriage is faltering, whose old friends are carping and whose health shows the strain of the relentless work -- but who still insists he is "having fun, every day." Arriving on a campus amid rumors that he would be hanged in effigy for his Bosnia policy, Lake scribbled a characteristically whimsical response: "No noose is good noose."

Yet there is a noose -- around Lake and the Administration's foreign policy more generally -- and it can be summarized in two words: Bosnia policy. The Administration has had its foreign policy successes, in Haiti and elsewhere. But the failures in Bosnia have overshadowed these developments in part because they represent the collision of the two great historical lessons of the last half-century. One is the lesson of Munich: that aggression in the heart of Europe must not be appeased. The other is the lesson of Vietnam: that foreign crusades can easily trap Americans in blood baths. One lesson says get in; one says stay out. Lake's failed attempts to reconcile them paint a disturbing picture of American power in the post-cold-war world.

For Lake, the events in Bosnia have also revived the conflict that has most troubled him throughout his unusual career. That is the conflict between ideals and interests -- and when it comes to Bosnia, most Americans have spent some time in its grip, appalled at the carnage and appalled as well at the risks of getting involved. The conflict between ideals and interests arises perpetually in American foreign policy, in places from Chechnya to China. And perhaps no one better personifies the competing traditions, of expansive idealism and constrained national interest, as Anthony Lake, who has given half his heart to each faith for more than 30 years.

To a job traditionally held by unambiguous embodiments of American power -- men like Henry Kissinger -- Lake brings the most puzzling resume. It reads like a story of twin brothers separated at birth. He served as Kissinger's young confidant; he resigned in protest and became head of a voluntary service program. He still gets a look of teen-age excitement when he talks about well digging in Kenya. But no one confuses him for a bureaucratic naif. "I mean this in a complimentary sense," says one of his White House colleagues, who compares Lake with the most Machiavellian figure of the Bush Administration. "He's the closest thing we have to Richard Darman in terms of bureaucratic gamesmanship."

Lake's awkward, self-mocking demeanor adds to the identity puzzle. Though he acts as the President's first contact with the gravitas world of generals, admirals, diplomats and spies, he makes no effort to appear Olympian. He jokes about the size of his ears and claims to revel in his anonymity. "One more potted plant imitation," he said one day as he took his place at a Presidential ceremony. Odd things can move him, as when he rushed to rescue a dangling modifier in the middle of a lunchtime conversation: "Whew -- almost a grammatical error on the record."